Friday, August 05, 2011

If you remember, a few weeks ago, I showed a pic of some small granny squares. Well, they have now become this:

It was after I made the party hats, I was thinking about what to make for my Mum's birthday, and as an extension of the party hat thoughts, the idea of a crown popped into my head. The original idea was to crochet an inside and an outside for the crown and sandwich some crown shaped card in the middle. But, as I worked on it, I went off that idea as I thought it would be much nicer if the holes in the granny square were still open and see-through.

So, my next thought was to sugar starch it, which is what I’ve done. It was rather an experiment as the granny squares and triangles are made in random acrylic yarns and I’ve only sugar starched cotton before. I just wasn’t sure if the sugar starching would work so well in acrylic.

I do think the end result looked better in cotton, but it still looked good in acrylic too. The acrylic did take longer to dry, and even now that it’s completely dry, some of the squares still look as if they might be a bit damp. It did also take longer to dry – 4 days on the bucket followed by 2 days freestanding.

I had the bin from Alexander’s bedroom all lined up as a mould to dry the crown on but I completely forgot about the effects of gravity on sticky, wet, acrylic! I ended up tying the opposite points of the crown together across the top of the bucket to get them to stand up nicely – thank goodness that worked!

I do think the end result works very well and was very surprised and impressed when I originally took it off the bin. I deliberately tried to stick to jewel-toned yarns and the colours work well too.

This week I also finished the coasters I was making for my Mum’s birthday – finished weaving in the ends about half an hour before I gave them to her!

The coasters were made using this gorgeous pattern from the Yvestown blog which I’d been wanting to try for a while. While I do like the ones I've made, I really love the colours of Yvonne's - why do I never find any yarn in colours that gorgeous?

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Ummm, I have to confess that over the last week I accidentally started a new giant granny! Square this time rather than hexagonal.

I wanted to make a shawl/blanket for a toy I made recently and still have to share and I decided, as a bit of a stash buster, to use all the odd balls of lilacy-purpley yarn I have in my stash. The problem then, once I did that, was that it turned out too nice just to give to a toy and for playing with.

So it's my new, accidental, giant granny. The problem now is that I'm running pout of some shades of yarn. It's all been in my stash for years. Some of it are odd balls of stuff that came free with magazines, some of it I know what it is, some of it I don't. And given how old it is, it's highly unlikely I'll find anything that matches exactly. So I'm going to see what I can get hold of - some solid colours should be fairly straightforward, the varigated yarns won't be so easy. And then we'll see what happens.

I had a little play around to see what a blanket of my purple granny squares might look like.